The Revolution Will Be YouTubed: Syria's Video Rebels

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AFP / Getty Images

A video grab from Youtube shows a man throwing a rock at a passing tank in Dera'a, Syria on April 25, 2011.

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So why is Adnan now risking everything to post these videos? "Freedom", he says. "And dignity." With journalists barred entry from Dara'a and the internet cut, Adnan and his friends have come to play a vital role in helping to tell the world what is happening there. Having spent years circumventing widespread censorship that saw Facebook, YouTube and political blogs blocked until just a few months ago when President Al-Assad's regime pushed through pre-emptive popular reforms, Adnan has learned how to find a way through.

Beside him, his team of activists sit busily tapping on their English-Arabic keyboards. Before the uprising, these young men were nothing more than a group of friends who would meet in a local cafe to socialize, smoke water pipes and play chess. All that changed when the protests began — they gave up chess and started filming protest videos instead.

One of them is an old schoolmate, Mohammed, whom Adnan credits with his transformation from techie to revolutionary. By a fateful coincidence, the two friends met for the first time in years just as Mohammed was returning to Damascus from Dara'a.

"We had been watching our Tunisian and Egyptian brothers for months but never believed this could happen here", says Mohammed, sipping at his tea. Dressed casually in T-shirt and jeans with thick gelled hair, Mohammed has a pale face and earnest expression that evoke something out of the Twilight saga more than the traditional image of a battle-hardened revolutionary activist. "I used to write novels about a generic struggle for freedom under an oppressive regime, but I never thought I would be able to place these events in my own country", he says.

He describes the atmosphere in Dara'a in the earliest days of the uprising. What began with children writing anti-regime graffiti on school walls soon escalated to street protests when the children were taken away for interrogation by the hated secret service agents, known as mukhabarat. After decades of frustration at endemic corruption and strict land regulations imposed on the city because of its sensitive location just miles from the Jordanian border, protesters cast off the fear that had helped to keep the regime in place for more than 40 years and took to the streets in their thousands.

But now the uprising has spread far beyond Dara'a to the northern city of Homs, the Mediterranean ports of Baniyas and Lattakia, the home region of the ruling Assad family and their minority Alawite sect, and even the capital Damascus. As in Egypt, Tunisia, and Yemen, Syrians are calling for more freedoms, improved economic choices and an end to corruption. "I just want a country where I can go to a public office and be treated as a citizen, not threatened because I'm asking for my rights, or required to bribe to get things done," says Mohammed.

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